UTF-8 Characters in URL - IE problem

Question

I'm trying to create Google calendar links from posts, I do it like so:

$base_url = 'http://www.google.com/calendar/event';
        $params = array(
            'action' => 'TEMPLATE',
            'text' => strip_tags(get_the_title()),
            'dates' => $dates,
            'details' => strip_tags( get_the_excerpt() ),
            'location' => $location,
            'sprop' => get_option('blogname'),
            'trp' => 'false',
            'sprop' => 'website:' . home_url()
        );
        $url = add_query_arg( $params, $base_url );
        return esc_html($url);

but IE reads UTF-8 chrachters in URL as percent-encoded (this is a general issue, because the standard "pretty urls" are precent-encoded in IE as well), so instead of

someurl.com/שלום

I get

someurl.com/%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9D

Is there a solution for this problem on WP side? I'm not sure how to tackle this issue, could it be in WP core or is there something I can do for my generated calendar urls. I must note that FX and Chrome encode the characters correctly. Thanks

Answer 1

Have a look at the PHP function urlencode(), that will hopefully help.

Also, in the latest update of Wordpress (3.3.1) they have fixed it so that permalinks (post slugs) no longer contain special characters. This of course doesn't help with your already existing slugs, but I'm sure there are ways and means of cleaning that field in your database.